funky music shooter with trippy animation and cool sounds, but its aesthetic quality cuts into its legitimacy as a game.

everyday shooter is most clearly described as an 'on-rails' twin-stick shooter, in the aesthetic mold of music-rhythm games like rez and frequency.

you play as a little white rectangle, begining at the centre of the screen. using the left analogue stick to move and the right stick to shoot, the player generally destroys anything and everything that appears and get the highest score. the rules, and how the game plays out are very similar to c.lassic twin-stick shooters such as robotron 2084 and super smash tv; you go through many stages. you have a limited number of lives. get hit once and you die. if you lose all your lives you begin at the first stage again. this being a contemporary game though, it allows you to trade in your score points for extra lives at the menu screen. so if it gets a little hard, you can buy more goes.

but because this game is 'post-rez' (but keeping in mind geometry wars), it's very much inspired by the pure aesthetic vision of that game, in which each part of the game serves to either look interesting or sound good. abstraction is best for this goal as story can be brushed aside, and the graphics can get as wild and crazy as the designer wants. perhaps the modern equivalent of robotron is actually halo or dead rising, and not this. robotron had a story and i can imagine that if it was made today, it would be in the standard high-res graphics.

where everyday shooter splits from its c.lassic gaming roots is the fact that it is effectively on-rails. in the image above you'll see a bar at the bottom of the screen. that's similar to the time bar when you play a music track. the game does not entirely revolve around you. events happen, and you can shoot or evade. sometimes certain types of enemies will chase after you or behave oddly, as in pac-man where ghosts had personality types.

but essentially, this game is visual music that you 'add' too, or collaborate with. you could be having a really tough time surviving but to other people they would just dig the funky grooves and the trippy visuals! the player's panic is not visible.

there is a lot of depth and variety and creativity in this game. it's simple, challenging and each stage behaves slightly differently. it's as if each level is a completely different abstract painting with each blob of paint or geometric shape having its own attitude and rhythm. what this equates to in terms of interaction relates to the scoring system. there are different ways to 'chain' scores (once you kill an enemy they drop a white rectangle that adds to your score), and so shooting one enemy might expand it if you prolong your ejaculation, then if smaller enemies touch that expanding circular enemy, they also turn into circles and you get more points. so depending on how you time enemy kills, different contextual effects occour.

my only real criticisms of the game is that each stage is quite long and the player has no control over this, so each time they get game over, they're sent back and have to sit through the initial music tracks before getting back to the one they died on. it's not like in robotron where when you kill all the enemies, it warps you to the next stage. so the game sits kind of awkwardly between being a hardcore retro shooter, and a contemporary art game. this one is for the patient and dedicated shooter fans!

-just_nonplussed

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